


Look and Remember

by Cadhla



Series: A Travelogue for Exiles [4]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 23:50:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5560666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A life as long as the Doctor's has much to remember, and much to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look and Remember

Look and remember. Look upon this sky;  
Look deep and deep into the sea-clean air,  
The unconfined, the terminus of prayer.  
Speak now and speak into the hallowed dome.  
What do you hear? What does the sky reply?  
 _The heavens are taken: this is not your home._

\-- Karl Shapiro, "A Travelogue for Exiles."

***

"Look and remember," commands the poem, and it seems like a reasonable request; it seems, at the very least, like something that should be heeded, if not entirely obeyed. And so the Doctor looks, and--for the moment, at least, for this little breath of time, while there's still time--he remembers...

*

_Look and remember..._

*

It's half-past eleven in the morning, and why they're in Basingstoke is a mystery to absolutely everyone involved--including, unfortunately, the fungal intelligence that was well on the way to converting every inhabitant of the town into spore-incubators when they arrived. Now the streets are choked with toadstools the size of grown men's heads, homicidal maniacs are chasing them at every juncture, and worst of all, there's not a single place where a man can stop to get his Companion's increasingly unsuitable footwear replaced with something more practical. Not when giant mushrooms run all the shops.

It's not that he particularly _minds_ Sarah Jane's usual taste in shoes; it's just that when the streets are overflowing with fungal slime, even so-called "sensible" heels cease to be anything verging on sensible, and the last thing he needs today is another turned ankle. No, what she needs is a nice, solid pair of loafers, or perhaps something in a properly-sized running shoe. Something that will stand up to spending the next several hours running for their lives through the increasingly gray, hostile streets of what used to be a relatively pleasant little town.

He's distracted enough by thoughts of Sarah Jane's footwear--and by the somewhat less pressing, more offhand curiosity as to why, precisely, he would have chosen now to get properly concerned about a subject which he's always been willing to leave to the women whose feet fetch up in bondage--that he nearly runs headlong into the large, fungus-infected man now barring further passage up the roadway. He stumbles backward, and Sarah Jane stumbles into him, and really, this day simply isn't getting any better, is it?

The man growls, showing teeth that have been pitted and eaten away by the fungal strands that are in the process of replacing his brain. Not the most social of greetings, but given the circumstance, it will do.

"Hello," says the Doctor, smiling broadly. "I'm the Doctor. Would you happen to know the way to the nearest shoe shop?"

*

_...look upon this sky..._

*

Romana is kissing him again, and her hands are doing truly _fascinating_ things beneath the unfastened flap of his trousers, causing at least some portion of his anatomy to rise to full attention, but the bulk of his mind is elsewhere, and she can tell; it's plain from the irritated regard in her blue, blue eyes as she rolls them upwards to study him, and in the questioning tilt of her eyebrows.

Finally, she disengages, with a snort of such surpassing disgust that he's really more than marginally impressed. "Well?" she demands.

There are a great many answers to that sort of question--which isn't really a question at all, more a semi-verbal prompt for the listener to start answering all the questions that haven't actually been asked--and so he takes the coward's way out, just for the sake of expedience: he doesn't answer it at all. "Have you ever been to Sirius IX during the harvest? Not the first one, when they bring in all the winter fruits, but the main spring harvest, after the fishing boats have come in."

Now she's looking at him like he's lost his mind. It's not an uncommon expression for her to wear, and that's all right, really, because it suits her. It's one of the few expressions that's stayed the same between her incarnations, and it looks just as good when presented with fairy-tale blonde hair and vast blue eyes as it did with aristocratic cheekbones and hair the color of fine ale. Regeneration has been good to Romana, all things considered. Certainly better than it's ever bothered to be to him.

"Doctor," she says, and not without a degree of patience, which he appreciates; he knows how hard it is for her, after all. "Are you telling me that we're going to Sirius IX for the harvest, or is there some other point in here that I'm managing to miss?"

"Oh, a little bit of both," he says, with an engaging smile, which--from the way Romana's eyes narrow--utterly fails to engage. "We're going to Sirius IX for the year that there _wasn't_ a spring harvest, because the fishing boats have been eaten by a vast sea-dwelling horror that isn't indigenous to the planet!"

From the brightness of his smile and the twinkle in his eyes, Romana half expects him to add "and won't that be fun?'" to the end of his statement. Mercifully, he doesn't, and she's quite glad of that, really, as she didn't make time on the day's itinerary for killing her traveling companion and stuffing him into one of the many, many TARDIS closets.

"So we're traveling to Sirius IX to...prod the sea-dwelling horror?"

"Not so much 'prod' as 'figure out why it's there, and how to make it stop eating the fishing boats'," the Doctor replies, somewhat indignantly. "Really, you make us sound like small children with sticks."

Romana smoothes the front of his trousers closed, and stands, smiling ruefully. She loves him, this strange, mad little man, but there are times..."Honestly, Doctor, I rather thought that was what we _were_."

*

_...the unconfined..._

*

"Grandfather, _do_ come on!" Susan stomps her foot, all but vibrating in place with the endless need of the young to go, to run, to do, to be while the world is still fresh and clean and filled to the brim with its own newness. Someone else, says her expression, is rubbing all the shine off the universe _right now_ , and if her reality is going to get played with and smudged, it had best be her hands that do the smudging.

"Old men do not hurry, Susan. They walk, and savor every step as if it were their last." He loads as much pretentious gravity as he can onto those words, and is rewarded when Susan rolls her eyes, practically spinning them like tops within the confines of her physiology. "The stables will still be there in five minutes. I can safely assure you of that."

Not even the assurances of a time traveler are enough to convince his stubborn granddaughter--so like her mother at that age, although rather more strong-willed, he'd wager, given how well she's done outside the laws and boundaries of Gallifrey--that she has time to spare, and so she rolls her eyes again, and races on ahead, pausing only to look back over her shoulder and vibrate, almost accusingly, in place.

Something in that pose, that posture, that clear, clean line of impatient youth against a rural alien sky, is enough to make his chest tighten, and his old eyes briefly, barely blur with tears he would deny if anyone were foolish enough to ask him. She's so beautiful, his Susan, and so young, and these days are so very, very short. He's stolen her youth back from the hallowed halls of Gallifrey, wrapped it up with a bow and given it to her as her dowry, but not even a time machine can make a childhood last forever. All he can do is make each day count for as much as it can, while her innocence melts into experience, until the day that she smiles at him, and he sees a woman where a child had been.

"Are you _coming_?" she demands, impatience welling up beyond her control once again. It might have irritated him, on another day, but not here, not now, not today. Today will only be here once, after all, however many times he may come to see it happen. Today, he loves her too much and too fiercely to be anything but glad in her youth, her strength, and the fierce passion of her innocence.

"What is it about little girls and horses, anyway?" he asks, grumbling for effect as he reaches her side, and clumps roughly past, keeping his voice gruff and annoyed. "They're dirty, stubborn beasts. Why the humans chose to domesticate _them_ when they had so many better options, I'll never know. Why, the llama..."

"Grandfather," Susan chides, but she's laughing, and so he abandons his half-formed diatribe to watch her run ahead of him, down the little dirt lane, to the stable where the promised pony is waiting for her, waiting to let her straddle its back and lead it out into the world, where perhaps a pony might run, or frolic, or be given its reins and allowed to do as it will. Freedom is such an easy gift to give, when you are simple, and innocent, and young.

Hands down by his sides, following slowly behind, the Doctor gives Susan her reins.

*

_...the terminus of prayer..._

*

When giant rubber monsters rise out of the Channel to threaten the English coastline, common logic dictates that you call the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, since absolutely no other agency is willing to claim responsibility for something that looks as if it ought to be appearing opposite Godzilla in the next Tokyo blockbuster. To be completely fair, UNIT wasn't all that sure about it either, but they were willing to at least give it a go, if only because allowing Eastbourne to be eaten by plastic carnivores just because no one could figure out whose jurisdiction they were seemed rather silly.

Lieutenant Alexander Burton was beginning to seriously reconsider this approach, as news had come back from two of the surveillance teams that the monsters were not only unphased by conventional weaponry, but seemed to find the depleted uranium rounds fired by the tanks attempting to protect Eastbourne to be fairly tasty. Enough so that they had given off prying the roofs off retirement communities in favor of chasing down and devouring the tanks. So the primary goal of protecting the citizens of Britain was being achieved, in its way, but...

"We haven't got that many bloody _tanks_ ," he muttered, aware that his voice had taken on the faintly peevish note of a schoolboy being denied his sweets, but unsure as to how to stop it. Somehow, "task force on aliens" hadn't seemed real. Not until the monsters came.

Oh, there had been that nonsense in London, but since most folks regarded UNIT as somewhat less cutting-edge and realistic than a Sunday school pageant, they hadn't even been invited, save as an afterthought. An insult at the time, but as it was one which resulted in most of their senior staff surviving, while all the world's other experts on alien activity died horribly. And that, inevitably, brought them here, trying to hold off the giant rubber monsters, or at least stop them from eating anything more vital than Eastbourne. Brighton was just down the coast, after all.

_If you're ever in_ real _trouble,_ he'd been told once, by a retired Brigadier who had looked, if he was being honest, rather too dotty to be taken seriously, _pray for the sound of an asthmatic horse with something lodged in its throat. It doesn't particularly matter who shows up after that, because whatever he looks like, he'll be the solution to all your problems. And the source of a few dozen more, but those will be easier to handle._

At the time, Burton had dismissed him as a crazy old man who'd never quite gotten over his own dreams of military glory and repelling an alien invasion. Now, however...any port in a storm, as they say.

When he heard the horse beginning to wheeze just behind the makeshift command tent, he wasn't surprised.

Just relieved.

*

_...speak now..._

*

Jack is drunk.

Jack is more than drunk; Jack has achieved that rare state of total, perfect drunkenness that only comes upon the foolish and the lucky, and even those experience it but rarely. The Doctor can only look on him with admiration and envy as he downs another mug of ale, grins the bright, slightly baffled grin of a twelve year old boy, and resumes telling Rose all the reasons that he really, truly, honestly loves her, even when the room isn't gently spinning all around him.

"Come off it," says Rose, who has only had five mugs of this little spaceport dive's truly excellent ale; it'll be a while before she's too drunk to be nice, if she ever gets there at all. It's rather more likely that she'll simply slump gently to the bar when the alcohol gets to be too much for her, and the Doctor will wind up carrying them both back to the TARDIS. Again.

Still, she's laughing, and Jack is too deeply into his cups to really interpret what she's saying as rejection. Not that it is, exactly, save in the sense that they've both had far too much to drink, and he isn't proposing a tumble anyway; what he's professing is really love, true love, the love of a knight for his lady, or of a hero for his ideals. He means every word, too, even though he doesn't know it; the Doctor has had twice as much to drink as either of them, but he's still sober, and he understands what Jack doesn't about the things that Jack is saying, and he loves them both. Jack for saying those words, and Rose for laughing them away.

"No, I mean it," Jack is insisting, all puppy-dog eagerness and drunken innocence. The bartender puts another mug of ale down next to his hand, and he grabs it, drinks deeply, and continues, "It's like following a road. A wonderful road you've never seen before, and no one can tell you where it goes, and what's going to be at the end? Who knows! No one knows, because no one's ever walked the whole way, they get distracted, they find things and leave the path. But you're the road, and walking on you is the best distraction I've ever...what was I saying?"

" _Walking_ on me?" Rose demands. She's laughing again. There's so much joy in this room. So much that can't endure when the lights come up. But that doesn't matter, really, because everything else is in the future, and the future is another country. The Doctor knows that aphorism better than most, for all that his passport is checked with more return trips from the future to the past than any other in the universe.

"Walking on you," says Jack, earnestly.

The sound of the Doctor starting to laugh surprises them both, but they turn towards the sound gladly, and they smile at him like the short-lived stars that they are, beaming brilliantly through the endless dark of time.

"What's funny, then?" Rose wants to know.

"You are," he says, and rises, kissing first her forehead, and then Jack's, and then -- because it seems necessary -- both of them again, first Jack, and then Rose. "The both of you are. Don't ever change."

They will, of course. All living things change. That's what makes them alive, and that's what makes moments like this so very precious; because they never last. Sometimes they don't even last long enough for you to realize that they exist.

"And you!" Jack says, raising one finger as if to illustrate the drunken point that he hasn't even made yet. "You!"

"Me?" the Doctor prompts.

That's all that's required; Jack is off and running again, now praising the Doctor, now praising Rose, now praising himself for being clever and wondrous enough to attract the attention of such luminaries, now simply praising himself, although that seems to be more habit than anything else. It doesn't make sense half the time, but then, it doesn't need to; it's enough that it exists. That anything exists, here, and now.

The Doctor laughs, and orders them all another round.

*

_...and speak into the hallowed dome..._

*

It's still Basingstoke, despite the soft, comforting blanket of fungal gray that's covering the streets and houses in every direction that the eye can see. Not that the Doctor particularly cares by this point; the fungus that started off as just a speck of gray amidst the rioting colors of his scarf has taken solid root now, and his thoughts are mostly a jumble of sensory impressions, all of them softened and blurred together into a vast, sticky mass. The occasional concern for Sarah Jane's shoes manages to spike its way through the general morass, but even those are becoming less and less pressing. Once the fungus has her, she won't have ankles she can turn, after all. And won't that be nice?

Sarah Jane, it would seem, doesn't think so. Bound to the wall by loops of oversized hyphae, and half-naked due to the fabric-eating qualities of several of the breeds of fungus now running rampant through the city, she's been keeping up a steady barrage of screaming and swearing for quite some time now, mostly directed at the fungus-covered guards who were once the citizens of Basingstoke. If the Doctor still had the capacity to get irritated, he would be; her shouting is really quite distracting.

(The part of him that isn't entirely wrapped in the fungal hive-mind--the part that persists in spiking thoughts of peaceful gray with thoughts of insensible shoes--is cheering her on as loudly as it can, exalting in every infuriated shriek and demand that the guards have the common decency to supply her with some new trousers. She's keeping him from falling entirely into the gray. He would love her forever, for that alone.)

When the guards abruptly stop their slow, ponderous patrolling and topple forward, squelching into the grayness of the floor, he's not sure who's the more surprised--himself, Sarah Jane, or the ponderous group intelligence formed by the individual fungal bodies.

When the Master strides into the room, carrying a large spray canister filled with clear liquid, he has to place "himself" at the top of the list.

"Ah, Miss Smith," says the Master, before spraying the hyphae that hold her with the liquid. It splashes on her skin, but she seems entirely unbothered by the contact, while the fungus all around her withers and retracts, leaving bare patches of wall exposed in their wake. "Still human, I trust?"

"What are you doing here?" she demands, before the loops around her ankles give way, and she topples to the fungal carpet. The Master bends just enough to offer her a hand. With a mistrustful glance, she takes it.

"This pitiful planet is of no use to me if it becomes nothing but a breeding ground for mutant fungus, Miss Smith," he says.

Sarah Jane stands, brushing as much of the clinging gray off her front as she can, and eyes the Master boldly, making no efforts to cover herself. "Are you going to save him?"

"Unfortunately, and against my better judgment, yes," the Master replies, and then the world burns in hard, fungicidal white, chasing alien intelligences from the Doctor's mind, chasing away the softness...

"You still need more sensible shoes," says the Doctor, and stands.

*

_...what do you hear..._

*

"Next time," Romana says, between gritted teeth, "do not take me literally when I ask if you're going to prod the sea-dwelling horrors!"

"Save your breath!" the Doctor advises, and keeps running.

They're racing ten yards ahead of death--not uncommon, really, but the rapidly rising tide 's threatening to swamp their sandbar is providing what Romana really considers an unnecessary added complication. It's not bad enough that they're being pursued by vast oceanic lizards with far too many teeth, they have to add a water hazard as well?

Sirius IX really is a very attractive place, with warm, violet-colored seas, and a pale yellow sky spangled with half a dozen moons of varying sizes. The natives are friendly, agreeable people, half of them still bearing traces of their coats of winter scales, and all of them equipped with thin membranes that can slide over their eyes, protecting them from the small, stinging creatures that live in the water.

Those nictating membranes were what finally caused the Doctor to realize that the sea-dwelling horrors weren't extraplanetary in origin after all; they were the children of one of the fishermen, having hatched from eggs lain during the Forbidden Season, a time when breeding had been forbidden for so long that everyone had forgotten why the prohibition was lain down in the first place. "Hatch during the warm season, and you get peaceful sentients who just want to tend their farms and till the land," he'd said, grimly, after reviewing the oldest of the sacred texts. "Hatch during the freeze, and you get something quite different. Some poor girl went out on the boats with her egg-time near, and didn't know what the consequences would be."

"Seasonal species dimorphism?" she'd asked. It made a measure of sense, if you were looking to continue species and not culture. During the cold months, the land was semi-uninhabitable, while the seas were comfortable and full of food. During the summer, on the other hand, the seas were filled with stinging creatures and toxic planktons, while the land was a paradise, assuming you were dealing with creatures that needed no more resources per individual than your standard human-sized biped.

"Exactly," he'd said, and then they were off to the seaside, to see whether the vast, scaled horrors possessed any of the sentience of their regrettably devoured parents.

*

Unfortunately, the horrors didn't. Nor did they respect the fact that eating Time Lords might not be good for their digestion. And now, inevitably, she and the Doctor were running away just as fast as their legs would carry them, hoping to reach land before they learned exactly what it felt like to be at the bottom of the food chain.

With a final crash, the surf closes over the sand bar, and for a moment, Romana is floating in a briny soup of tangling kelp strands and small creatures that sting and bite every possible inch of her skin. Then strong hands are grabbing her arms, and she's being hauled roughly out onto the stony outcropping of the beach, the Doctor pounding her on the back while five of the natives shriek and hurl their spears at the retreating horror.

She coughs out what feels like a liter of water, and takes a deep, shuddering breath. The Doctor smiles at her, smoothing her sodden hair out of her eyes.

"Doctor?" she gasps.

"Yes, Romana?"

"No more harvest festivals."

And he laughs.

*

_...what does the sky reply..._

*

Susan is sitting on her pony, and everything is right about the universe.

It's not the most impressive example of its breed that the Doctor has ever seen, all knobby knees and tangled yellow-gray mane, but from the look on his granddaughter's face, it is the pinnacle of all horse-kind, the one equine on which all past and future ponies will be based, if the world has any sense about such things. It is the ur-pony, the once and future steed, and she is the queen of all that she surveys, riding high and proud as ever a girl has ridden.

"Grandfather, look!" she shouts, and digs her heels into the long-suffering pony's sides, causing it to lumber into something that might be charitably called a trot. From his place in the spectator's stands, the Doctor applauds genially, indicating approval of her equestrian abilities. Pride satisfied, Susan relents, and the pony slows once more to its natural plod.

She's already plodded around the paddock three times, each time punctuating the trip with cries of "look, look, Grandfather, look," as if she were the first girl to ever ride a pony, or fall in love with it the moment that she saw its silhouette upon the stable wall. Her fascination with the exercise seems infinite, for the moment, and he's content to leave her to it and simply watch as she makes her turns around the paddock, hands clutching the reins, heels bobbing with excitement. The days of little girls and ponies are so very limited, after all. May as well enjoy them while they last.

There are times when he wonders whether he did the right thing, stealing her from the safety of her birthplace, where she might have grown up to be a proper lady with ribbons in her hair and all the universe to be her plaything, and bringing her here, where the best she can hope to be is a dirty little pony at a half-forgotten farm in the middle of nowhere. But then he watches her, and realizes that ladies, ribbons in their hair or no, never know this sort of joy; they never learn to take their happiness from plodding, commonplace things, or really, in the end, from much of anything at all.

He has known Time Ladies in his day, and has loved them, from his mother to his wife to the woman who bore Susan, who gifted her with that dark, sleek hair and those too-solemn eyes. He's loved them all.

But he loves his granddaughter more.

"Grandfather, look!" she crows again, and on this day, this one, perfect day that will end too soon and will last forever, he applauds her bravery, and her innocence, and he looks.

*

_...the heavens are taken..._

*

Lieutenant Alexander Burton isn't entirely sure what sort of salvation he'd expected from an asthmatic horse, but it wasn't this small, slightly unkempt Scottish man, with his straw hat and his umbrella, or the slightly scornful figure of his dark-blonde traveling companion, whose overstuffed rucksack seemed to be in serious danger of bursting at the seams at any moment.

"You seem to have a bit of problem, good sir," says the little man, rolling the "r" in problem until it practically becomes a word all on its own. "Perhaps we can be of some assistance."

_I doubt that,_ thinks the Lieutenant, but he's backed into a corner, now, he'll try anything that means he runs out of monsters before he runs out of tanks, and besides, he'd been listening for that sound all day long. "If you think you can, I'm open to suggestions," he says, gruffly. "The damned things just crawled up out of the sea and started making for Eastbourne. They're tearing the place apart."

"They've got taste, then," says the blonde.

Her Scottish friend shakes his head, but his expression remains amused, even as he genially chides, "Now, Ace, if we didn't have Eastbourne, we'd have..."

"A lack of Eastbourne?" she suggests.

"Fair enough. I'm the Doctor, Lieutenant. We first met five years from now, although you don't remember it, which is only fair, given that I won't remember you when the time comes." The little man extends his hand, and Lieutenant Burton shakes it, too bemused to do much else. Odd to think that a day which started with plastic sea monsters can manage to get any stranger. "This is Ace, my lovely assistant. Please don't leave her unsupervised around your explosives."

The blonde woman--Ace--snorts audibly.

The Doctor takes no notice, but puts an arm around the Lieutenant's shoulders, asking amiably, "Tell me, Lieutenant, have there been any science fairs held around here recently? We're probably looking for a young boy, late teens at best, with an interest in horror films and psychic phenomenon. He may have been trying to demonstrate mental projection of some sort, perhaps with a machine that he made himself..."

Despite himself, the Lieutenant feels the first flickering strands of hope begin to untangle themselves in his heart. "I'll get my men right on it. We'll check every school for a hundred miles."

"Wonderful. In the meanwhile--Ace, don't _touch_ that--perhaps we had best head for Eastbourne, hmmm? I'm sure there are some lovely people there who would be delighted not to be eaten today."

Maybe the dotty old man was right after all.

Maybe sometimes, prayers can be answered.

*

_...this is not your home._

*

Ten ales later, and Rose is down for the count, head against the bar, snoring in an entirely endearing, entirely unladylike manner. She looks almost like a rag doll, carelessly tossed aside by some child who will doubtless be coming back to claim her at any moment, once a new game is ready to begin.

Jack is still clinging to consciousness, although his earlier eloquence has faded, replaced by shorter, less coherent statements. Right now, he's eyeing the Doctor, wobbling slightly, even though he's still smart enough not to try anything as foolish as actual movement.

"You love her, don't you," he says, and it's half-question, half-statement, half-accusation, and if that makes more than a single whole, well, so did the three of them. Any two together would have been complete. Combine all three?

You had something magical.

"I do," the Doctor says, and leans over to gracefully pluck away Jack's last, half-full mug of the bar's excellent ale. "I love her like an astronomer loves a star." All distance and brightness and impossibility. That's his Rose; that's his Jack, too, come to think of it.

That's all the ones he's ever loved, and all the ones he's ever lost, from Susan to Ace, and all the ones that came between.

"I love her."

"I know you do." Taking pity, of a kind, the Doctor leans over and kisses Jack's forehead, a quick, glancing gesture that only one of them will remember in the morning. "She loves you."

Jack grins a dippy, drunken grin, and asks, "Really?"

"Oh, yes, really. And I love you. And you, my friend, are very, very drunk."

"Am not!" Jack protests, before the simple ludicrousness of the argument hits him, and he slumps forward to the bar next to Rose, laughing. The Doctor joins in, and they laugh together for a while, until the Doctor realizes that he's laughing alone; that Jack, like Rose, has slipped into the happy dreamland of one who has gotten well and truly drunk in the company of friends, on a night when nothing went wrong, and everything went plainly, impossibly right.

"Once again, it's left for me to do the tidying up," says the Doctor, and smiles, wistful and warm, as he rises. "Let's get you two home."

Perfection is fleeting, and rare, but if you live long enough, sometimes you just might find it.

*

"Look and remember," commands the poem; but there's so much to look at, and so much to remember, and in the end, all anyone can have is snapshots of the past, the little bits and pieces that get remembered, even when the more important parts have been forgotten. He doesn't remember the name of the boy who made the monsters, but he remembers Ace's unholy glee when he allowed her to blow his homemade generator sky-high; he remembers the way she grinned, backlit by the blast. He doesn't remember who unleashed the fungus, but he remembers Sarah Jane's silly red leather shoes, and the way they made her stumble.

He remembers Romana, soaked to the skin and cursing his name, and Susan with her pony, and Jack, so poetic, so rum-soaked, so besotted with the world, his traveling companions, himself. He remembers kissing Rose at the end of all things, breathing in the dark waters of Time, and being reborn, again and again, like a flame.

He remembers so little, but he remembers so much.

Putting the black leather jacket onto its hanger, he places it gingerly next to all the bits and pieces that he's forgotten, the straw hat, the scarf, the patchwork jacket, the cricketing sweater, all men he's been, all lives he's lived, dressed in velvet, in rags and tags, in cotton and in glory. Time to move on again. Time to grow a little older, and a little younger, and to change.

"This is not your home," says the poem, and that's right, and it's wrong as well, because this is his home, sure as it isn't, and that paradox is the hinge on which the world depends.

Rose is waiting for him. There's work to be done.

There always is.

The Doctor closes the closet door, and turns back towards the future.


End file.
